Show HN: SlothTracker – cross platform time tracking desktop app

https://www.royalsloth.eu/products/slothtracker

by RoyalSloth • 6 years ago

45 42 6 years ago

This looks interesting. I see that the license is only valid for a certain version. How often are new versions released? I couldn't find any info on release dates of previous/current versions.

RoyalSloth12• 6 years ago

They are not bound to specific dates, as shipping to hit an arbitrary date creates a buggy software.

A version is released when a new feature/a set of features is ready. This is actually the first public release, that's why there are no release dates online.

jamespetercook• 6 years ago

I think you should tie the licence to major versions, and give people confidence that they will still receive updates for bug fixes and patches. But they’ll have to purchase a licence to get new features.

Brave-Steak2• 6 years ago

I just feel it's hard to evaluate the price if I don't have a rough idea of how often there might be updates. Is it a monthly thing? Every 4 months? 8? Once a year? I don't know how much time passed between v1.0 and 1.1 and 1.2. I don't even need exact dates. A statement like "We expect to push out a new version every few weeks/months/once a year or so" makes it easier to reason about the cost.

AgloeDreams• 6 years ago

So don't take this too harshly, this looks well featured and I appreciate an ad-free model that can be used anywhere....

However... It truly amazes me how bad design and UX on many cross-platform desktop apps are. They often are literally the 'Big Bang Theory' of showing that backend engineers are downright inept at design.

This app uses basically zero affordances to help drive layout priority or association. Few Bold fonts, poor padding, time stamps are mashed together and VERY hard to read. The home-view table has an extra col, the time column is too wide and the title col is not wide enough to read whole task names. Your site literally illustrates a font-weight bug in the Mac version.

I'm sure it has great features and works fine! But your competition makes incredibly good looking products that are incredibly glanceable. Notably, many of the platform specific companies make amazing looking products that are deeply integrated into their OS. (Notably placement in the task/menu bar) Look at how Clockify is doing almost everything you do...for free. Sure, you offer data privacy by being fully offline..but then again you don't sync anything and forget about phones, you aren't even there!

I mean this looks like something you might find buried in an open source project from 2008...for $16USD.

RoyalSloth12• 6 years ago

The only way to improve is to hear such opinions. So thanks, will see what I can do about the design. It's easy to get carried away with feature development.

fit2rule3• 6 years ago

Please make it usable from the keyboard. Nothing irks me more than to have to mouse-wrangle things around to track my time, which I do in 6 minute increments, so it can get frustrating.

If I have a way to switch tasks by keyboard, I'm more likely to use the app. If I have to mouse-wrangle .. just, meh.

xupybd• 6 years ago

I'm impressed by your response. Keep up the good work. You are getting compared to commercial teams so don't lose heart.

But this is a good point time trackers are a chore to use for some of us. Mainly because we hate tracking time. So good UX is everything for people like myself.

SkyMarshal3• 6 years ago

To be honest, none of that stuff really matters in a productivity tracker, your UI is good enough.

The only thing that really matters in a productivity tracker is whether the tracker can automatically record my activity without me having to manually enter new tasks or manually tell it I'm swapping to another activity.

I jump around between brower tabs, terminal windows, ide's, music player, etc so frequently there's no way I'll ever take the time to manually record every time I alt-tab. All I really want is a tracker that automatically records the window title or tab title every time the window focus changes, and the timestamp.

Afaik that's not possible since OS's don't allow one app to know about the others running alongside it. A time tracker would have to be integrated into the OS to do that. But if anyone ever figured out a way to do that, plus fully offline operation and zero-cloud data privacy, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

dfsegoat• 6 years ago

This app uses basically zero affordances to help drive layout priority or association

This is O/T. but is there a decently concise "best practices" resource to which someone could refer to learn this stuff?

darderp• 6 years ago

Not quite a "best practices", but absolutely have a look at this: https://twitter.com/i/events/994601867987619840

quickthrower22• 6 years ago

Honestly for $16 honestly if it does the job it’s great value. Do you want him to hire a full time UX/UI person?

thrownaway9542• 6 years ago

Minimum 2GB or RAM!!! Seriously... WTF?

imperialdrive2• 6 years ago

I think it's a joke.

thrownaway9542• 6 years ago

He's selling this thing so I would think you wouldn't want to joke about the requirements.

BerislavLopac• 6 years ago

It's the requirement for the system, not for the app.

quickthrower22• 6 years ago

That’s so you can open your OS + Chrome to download this app!

hello_moto5• 6 years ago

Have you make any sales so far?

RoyalSloth12• 6 years ago

Yes

hello_moto5• 6 years ago

Congrats. Out of curiosity, what is your market segment breakdown (EU vs US)?

Seeing that this is a desktop app, I wonder if EU has a different sentiment than US market.

suyash• 6 years ago

Nice to see JavaFX app - best cross platform technology out there that is not very popular.

ankit70• 6 years ago

Learned about JavaFX. Why not Electron or other alternatives? Sorry if it sounds too childish.

spenvo• 6 years ago

As someone who has built a stats app for macOS, I wish you the best! Cross platform is a big deal and something I never got around to. I had trouble finding a business model that worked - have my upvote!

yitchelle• 6 years ago

When I read "cross platform", it also implies that my data is available across these these platform. For example, I log my time when I am on my desktop writing, and I log my time on my phone when I am on the road visiting clients. Both set of data are collected into the one database.

Does "cross platform" also carry this meaning for you?

RoyalSloth12• 6 years ago

No the word you are looking for is: synchronization.

Cross platform means works on multiple platforms (in this case Windows, Mac, Linux).

Show HN: SlothTracker – cross platform time tracking desktop app

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